# The Relations Among Anxiety, Movie‐Watching, and in‐Scanner Motion

## TL;DR

This study explores how watching anxiety-inducing movies affects children's movement during brain scans, finding that it may reduce motion and improve data quality.

## Contribution

The study introduces evidence that movie-watching paradigms can reduce in-scanner motion in children, potentially improving neuroimaging data quality.

## Key findings

- Anxiety-inducing movie clips reduce in-scanner movement compared to resting-state in children.
- Pathological anxiety had a small impact on movie-attenuated motion.
- Movie-watching paradigms may improve data quality in pediatric neuroimaging studies.

## Abstract

Movie‐watching fMRI has emerged as a theoretically viable platform for studying neurobiological substrates of affective states and emotional disorders such as pathological anxiety. However, using anxiety‐inducing movie clips to probe relevant states impacted by psychopathology could risk exacerbating in‐scanner movement, decreasing signal quality/quantity and thus statistical power. This could be especially problematic in target populations such as children who typically move more in the scanner. Consequently, we assessed: (1) the extent to which an anxiety‐inducing movie clip altered in‐scanner data quality (movement, censoring, and DVARS) in a pediatric sample with and without anxiety disorders (n = 78); and (2) investigated interactions between anxiety symptoms and movie‐attenuated motion in a highly powered, transdiagnostic pediatric sample (n = 2058). Our results suggest anxiogenic movie‐watching in fact reduces in‐scanner movement compared to resting‐state, increasing the quantity/quality of data. In one measure, pathological anxiety appeared to impact movie‐attenuated motion, but the effect was small. Given potential boosts to data quality, future developmental neuroimaging studies of anxiety may benefit from the use of movie paradigms.

Children and adolescents are a difficult‐to‐image population due their tendency to move during scanning sessions. Our results suggest youth show lower in‐scanner movement when viewing anxiogenic and non‐anxiogenic movie clips compared to rest.